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Month: April 2011

Though to be honest I’m not sure if today is even Beltaine proper (I’m really horrible at keeping track of the actual dates. When there’s a holiday every other month, I get horribly confused). Regardless, I’m going with Mid and a coworker to dance the May pole. It’s one of the nicer rituals of the year. Some of them get a little weighty, but this one tends to be pretty laid back.

We have a potluck afterwards, and I’m bringing homemade applesauce and a bean salad. There’s normally a bonfire at night. This turns into a whole day affair. I’m bringing my spindles and my fleece down to work on between the pole and potluck.

(Those aren’t our poles in the picture. I snagged those off of wikicommons. I do have pictures of last year’s pole, but I’m not the only one in them and they’re not my pictures, so I used an open license photo. It’s the same general effect though).

I didn’t post last week because I didn’t clean out the fridge. Which meant unfortunately, there’s two weeks worth of food waste.

However, it’s actually not as bad as I had feared it would be.

2 weeks worth of food

the bowl has a lot of little bits of things that didn’t get eaten, mostly rice. it’s the bacon makes me want to cry but that’s my own fault. i’m getting better about using up whatever i open, but i need to be more careful about splitting meats before i freeze them.

the box is about 1 left over chicken finger from something that mid bought last week. i tend to eat his leftovers when he gets take out. i hate that the pizza place next door uses such big boxes for everything. it’s a lot of waste and it takes up so much space in my fridge.

it helps that i’ve started putting my foot down and started giving mid left overs for lunch. we went through a phase where he would only eat those premade lunch bowls. but they’re insanely expensive (if i’m lucky i can find them at aldi’s for 1.50, otherwise they’re upwards of $3) and they were sometimes making up the majority of my grocery budget for the week. however, he also doesn’t pack his own lunches so i just…started giving him left overs.

It’s not that i feel like i’m blogging too often. I mean, i’m not forcing anyone to read this. I’m just going through a rather rough phase right now (and it seems to be never ending, to be honest). Things get marginally better and then things come crashing down around me. Find extra money in the budget? Gas hits $4 a gallon. Finally calm down from money guilt? My parents put down the dog that i’ve had since i was in high school. It’s just been a rollercoaster around here lately.

And then i look at my blog, the actual writing style, and feel guilty because it’s this weird mismash of styles. i think that i’ve been trying to keep too much of my personal life out of it, and it’s turned into this strange syngergy of informal blogging and ASA formatting. it’s like i’ve created some sort of blogging conference that i’m going to have find a suit jacket and stand up in front of people who are much better bloggers than i am and present my research. (While they secretly pity and/or laugh at me). (No, i’m not scarred by presenting my master’s research. not one bit). I’m not sure what i’m going to do about it. i’m not unfamiliar with blogging. i’ve had a livejournal for close to 6 years. I guess the answer is to start writing this like i write that, except THAT is so insanely informal. i dunno. this is a minor issue at best.

i have been finding myself crawling back into comfort patterns and i’m trying to keep as much guilt out of that as i can. i’m eating campbell’s pea soup for lunch. i’m baking pan after pan of brownies. i’m knitting miles and miles of garter stitch. i’m digging out my sheep plushies.

i just need a vacation. can it just be the week i took off in july, now?

I had a strange dream awhile back. I dreamed that I was standing in a lounge at the hospital my dad works at talking to an elderly man who was wearing hat and eating candy. He was chain smoking the entire time and he told me, ‘stupid girl, don’t you know that We always take care of you?’

Obviously this silly dream has stuck with me and I’ve done some light ritual work in response.

And thinking. A lot of thinking.

It’s not that I don’t know how to budget but somehow our budget went horribly, horrifically wrong this month. I feel bad about it but I’ve talked to people a lot older and wiser than myself and have sort of fallen into a one day at a time mentality. We’ll get through but it’ll be tight.

I got an email last week from my mom inviting us down for Easter and to remind us that we had groceries sitting in her house. Seven copy paper boxes worth of groceries. She’s apparently been shopping for months.

Welcome to Tardis kitchen.

It amazes me how much space this kitchen has. I had a full cars’ worth of kitchen stuff and I still have shelf space. That’s six boxes worth of food there and I barely had to put any of the food underneath the counter. I’m going to pack the yarn that I got last week into the boxes once I get that far. I’m doing the spring cleaning this week. I spent 6 hours on the kitchen today.

I did get a little knitting done on the drive but not much. I spent most of the weekend reading a bio/pop science book on Henrietta Lacks…it was a sobering read for someone who wanted to study disease, and then went into sociology. This is one of the cases that created the movement for IRBs, and yet it’s such an undertold story. It’s heartbreaking that we let these things happen and then call it progress. But that’s a digression.